From 2014... The cultural evolution of prosocial religions

From 2014... The cultural evolution of prosocial religions. Ara Norenzayan et al. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 39, December 2 2014. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/cultural-evolution-of-prosocial-religions/01B053B0294890F8CFACFB808FE2A0EF

Abstract: We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10–12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, or were copied by less successful groups. This synthesis is grounded in the idea that although religious beliefs and practices originally arose as nonadaptive by-products of innate cognitive functions, particular cultural variants were then selected for their prosocial effects in a long-term, cultural evolutionary process. This framework (1) reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and by-product approaches to the origins of religion, (2) explains a variety of empirical observations that have not received adequate attention, and (3) generates novel predictions. Converging lines of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines provide empirical support while at the same time encouraging new research directions and opening up new questions for exploration and debate.

7. Implications, counterarguments, and concluding remarks

7.1. Synthesizing existing views on the evolution of religion

Despite recent progress, the evolutionary study of religion is in its infancy, and important gaps remain in our knowledge and much work needs to be done to reach a more complete understanding. The theoretical framework presented here synthesizes key elements of the two most influential evolutionary approaches to religion to date: the by-product and adaptationist approaches. We note that both approaches have their merits and have generated rich theorizing and empirical literatures that have moved the field forward. Our framework builds directly on the by-product perspective that religious representations are made possible and facilitated by reliably developing features of human cognition that were not naturally selected for the production of the religious beliefs or behaviors that they now underpin. However, by embedding these ideas within a framework that considers more fully both genetic and cultural inheritance, we can account for a number of key phenomena not explicitly addressed by the cognitive by-product account.

Two examples illustrate this point. First, although the by-product account helps explain how people come to mentally represent supernatural agents, it is silent about one of the most critical features of (some) religions, that of deep faith or commitment to particular gods. This is captured by the “Zeus Problem” (Gervais & Henrich 2010), which asks how people in one place and time can acquire belief in, and commitment to, a particular religious representation, whereas people in another place or time do not, even when exposed to identical representation. ⁹ We argue that understanding the origin of faith requires explaining not only the cognitive mechanisms that allow people to mentally represent, remember, and transmit religious ideas, but, equally crucially, how people passionately and selectively commit to only a subset of all intuitively conceivable deities. We hypothesize that cultural learning biases, such as CREDs (Henrich 2009), are a crucial part of the explanation. In this view, if cultural learning cues are altered, significant shifts occur in the particular deities people believe in without altering their content. Second, most by-product approaches have not explicitly dealt with the body of empirical evidence showing that some religious elements spread by having prosocial effects. ¹⁰ In contrast, we offer an argument compatible with central aspects of the cognitive by-product view, but one that goes further and explains why some, but not most, “thinkable” cultural variants have powerful downstream social effects.

The current framework also accounts for a set of important phenomena that two distinct adaptationist theories of religion address: costly signaling approaches and the supernatural punishment hypothesis. Both perspectives accommodate the idea that the cognitions underlying religious beliefs and behaviors may have been evolutionary by-products, but both highlight their adaptive role (Bering 2006; Sosis 2009). The costly signaling approach, grounded in behavioral ecology, argues that extravagant religious displays are naturally selected for life in cooperative groups, allowing individuals to reliably signal their degree of cooperation or their group commitment to solve the free-rider problem (Bulbulia 2004; 2008; Irons 2001; Sosis & Alcorta 2003). This approach is compatible with cultural variability and cultural evolutionary logic, and recent work in this perspective has begun to integrate costly signaling accounts with models that take into account intergroup competition and cultural evolutionary changes (e.g., Sosis & Bulbulia 2011; Wildman & Sosis 2011). We have built a foundation that further promotes such synthesis by incorporating insights from this approach in two ways. First, by emphasizing CREDs as well as signaling, we account for both the cultural contagion generated by these extravagant displays and what they communicate to others about the actor's commitments. Second, by embedding signaling approaches within a cultural evolutionary framework (Henrich 2009), we can explain why people might acquire religious beliefs with varying degrees of commitment, as well as why individuals are more susceptible to acquiring religious beliefs that are backed up by credible displays. Our view also positions specific signals within a cultural evolutionary process that assembles practices and beliefs to exploit signaling logic over historical time. ¹¹

Another adaptationist account that has garnered interest is the supernatural punishment hypothesis (SPH) (e.g., Bering 2006; 2011; Johnson 2009), which argues that a fear of a moralizing god is a naturally selected genetic adaptation targeting moral self-constraint or error management. Although our framework and the SPH share many similarities, and draw from some of the same body of evidence, they also differ in interesting ways. Whereas we argue that fear of moralizing gods and other supernatural punishment beliefs were culturally selected in individuals and groups, the SPH argues that they are a genetic adaptation favored by within-group genetic selection, whose function is to restrain individuals from defection because of the social punishment they personally risk if caught (Johnson 2009; Johnson & Bering 2006; Schloss & Murray 2011). The cultural evolutionary framework and the supernatural punishment hypothesis in principle can be compatible, and we encourage debate on this possibility. However, our interpretation of the current ethnographic evidence raises two key challenges for this hypothesis. One is that the available evidence shows that in small-scale societies, and especially among foragers, gods have limited omniscience and little or no moral concern. Two, gods become more moralizing and interventionist as societies scale up and anonymity invades relationships, where the likelihood of escaping social sanctions for defection is greater, not smaller (for further discussion and critique, see Norenzayan 2013; Shariff et al. 2010). The framework we present here preserves the important insights and evidence from this hypothesis but also accommodates what would otherwise be empirical anomalies.

Our framework also circumvents what we argue are unproductive definitional debates about “religion.” Within religious studies, there is no widely accepted definition of what constitutes religion, or even if the term itself usefully picks out a coherent category of beliefs or behaviors (Saler 2009; Stausberg 2010). In our view, the concept of religion merely provides a pithy rhetorical prop to cue readers to the kinds of interrelated phenomena that require explanation. The religious package is a statistical pattern governed by specific hypotheses, rather than a predefined concept with necessary or sufficient features. There is, therefore, no expectation of a single overarching definition of religion or clear semantic boundaries, because the package of traits that gets labeled “religion,” although containing recurrent elements, culturally mutates in a predictable fashion, taking different shapes in different groups and at different historical times (Norenzayan 2013; for a similar but distinct account, see Taves 2009).

7.2. Counterarguments and alternative cultural evolutionary scenarios

Now that we have situated a cultural evolutionary framework in the broader debates about the evolution of religion, we evaluate the merits of alternative scenarios and counterarguments in light of the evidence. One obvious possibility we return to is reverse causation: the idea that prosocial religions are a consequence, rather than a cause, of social complexity and large-scale cooperation. To sharpen this alternative account, we consider two versions of the question. The broad version is that the causality is bidirectional: Prosocial religions are both a cause and a reflection of large-scale cooperation. In other words, they are best characterized as a mutually galvanizing feedback-loop. This is of course compatible with the hypothesis that prosocial religious elements contributed to the expansion of the cooperative sphere. The narrower version is that prosocial religions may be causally inert and only a by-product of large-scale cooperation (e.g., see Baumard & Boyer 2013).

We argue that this by-product-only account is difficult to reconcile with the breadth of the evidence for at least three reasons. First, we note that the religious priming data, supported by a meta-analysis, contradicts this alternative claim. Second, in the 15-culture experimental study conducted by Henrich et al. (2010a; 2010b), in which adherence to world religions (relative to local religions) predicted more prosocial behavior in economic games, this effect remained even after controlling for community size (as well as other variables implicated in religion and prosociality). If both prosocial religions and prosocial tendencies were merely a consequence of societal scale, statistically controlling for community size, market integration, income, education, and wealth would eliminate the association between world religion and prosocial behavior. The data did not support that. Third, the cross-cultural ethnographic patterns we discussed earlier pose a different kind of challenge to this account. There are multiple, statistically independent predictors of the prevalence of Big Gods (e.g., Botero et al. 2014; Peoples & Marlowe 2012). The by-product-only hypothesis would have to offer piecewise and special case explanations; that is, different accounts would have to be conjured up for why people who live in large, anonymous societies, practicing animal husbandry, engaged in agriculture, and exposed to ecological duress such as water scarcity, imagine Big Gods more than do people in other societies that lack these conditions. The causal hypothesis, in contrast, is backed up by experimental evidence, and it also offers a unified explanation for these cross-cultural patterns, as each of these socioecological conditions poses serious collective action problems to which prosocial religions with Big Gods contribute solutions (e.g., Botero et al. 2014; Peoples & Marlowe 2012).

Another cultural evolutionary scenario is that prosocial religions proliferated only after other mechanisms produced a set of conditions in which prosocial religions increasingly became a target of cultural evolutionary pressures. That is, prosocial religions may not have played an original role in enabling the rise of large-scale cooperative societies, but rather, they may have been a consequence. Once prosocial religions took shape, they then contributed to maintaining and expanding large-scale cooperation. ¹² Because the framework we have outlined does not specify a fixed temporal sequence, this scenario is a viable alternative given the available ethnographic, historical, and experimental evidence. We suspect that history will show some cases in which religious elements spread first, and then societies expanded, and other cases in which the societies expanded, and then the religious elements spread and in turn sustained and broadened the expansion. These alternative historical scenarios are ripe for research.

7.3. From religious belief to disbelief

The widespread occurrence of at least some forms of atheism ¹³ presents an interesting challenge for any evolutionary explanation of religion. Religion, by some evolutionary accounts, is either a suite of adaptive strategies built into evolved psychology, or it is a direct projection from reliably developing, species-specific, cognitive capacities onto the world. We take up this challenge in the framework presented here and offer an account of secularization. By combining insights from the by-product approach with cultural evolution, we suggest that psychologically real atheism is possible, even if some cognitive biases – all else being equal – push people toward religious belief. Our framework suggests that religious belief – as a joint product of cognitive biases, core existential motivations concerning mortality as well as control and meaning, and cultural learning strategies – may produce distinct psychological pathways that jointly or in isolation lead to disbelief (Norenzayan & Gervais 2013).

Therefore, rather than seeing “atheism” as a single phenomenon, our model treats it as a blanket term for several pathways to disbelief, including (1) mindblind atheism associated with deficits in mentalizing; (2) InCREDulous atheism, caused by the lack of witnessing extravagant displays of religious commitment; (3) apatheism or indifference to religion induced by the absence of existential threats or material hardship; and (4) analytic atheism, in which analytic cognitive processes override or block the cognitive intuitions that anchor religious beliefs. ¹⁴

Finally, because this framework tackles both recurrent features of prosocial religions, and historical and cultural changes over time, it gives center stage to questions about the conditions that give rise to secularization. We argue that, whereas multiple pathways likely stabilized large cooperative social groups, religiously driven prosociality was one powerful force. In most of humanity's past, and for many societies even today, the secular mechanisms and institutions that sustain prosociality, were – and often remain – rare or unreliable. Our analysis accommodates the fact that religiosity systematically varies depending on the social conditions that exist in particular populations at particular times. Religious prosociality was once one of the most effective ways to foster exchange among strangers or organize them for cooperative endeavors. However, the recent spread of secular institutions since the industrial revolutions – including democratic political institutions, policing authorities, and effective contract-enforcing mechanisms – has ushered in widespread large-scale prosociality without gods.

Our framework, therefore, provides an account of how secular societies climbed the ladder of prosocial religion and then kicked it away. Prosocial religions may have buttressed a cultural bridge between the small-scale human societies that dominated much of our evolutionary history and the complex secular societies of the modern world. However, with the emergence of strong secular institutions that promote public trust and existential security (Norris & Inglehart 2004), the selective forces that spread and sustained these belief–ritual packages began to ebb. This may have led first to a downgrading of concepts such as hell and God's wrath, which would have weakened the forces sustaining prosocial religions, and then gradually to the loss of religious faith itself. Conversely, prosocial religions continue to thrive where existential threats, such as natural disasters, material insecurity, and inefficient rule of law, remain rampant (e.g., Bentzen 2013; Norris & Inglehart 2004; Sibley & Bulbulia 2012).

It appears that God and government are both culturally and psychologically interchangeable. Experimentally induced reminders of secular moral authority had as much effect on generous behavior in an economic game as reminders of God (Shariff & Norenzayan 2007). The effect of participation in a world religion on punishing of selfish behavior disappears when a third-party punisher is introduced into the game (Henrich et al. 2010a), also suggesting some psychological interchangeability between supernatural and secular sources of monitoring and punishment. Cross-national surveys show that greater trust in government stability and control undermines religion (Norris & Inglehart 2004) and reduces distrust of atheists among believers (Gervais & Norenzayan 2012b; Norenzayan & Gervais 2015). Moreover, experimental manipulations or naturally occurring events (e.g., electoral instability) that lower faith in one of these external control systems (God or the government) lead to subsequent increases in faith in the other (Kay et al. 2008). There are signs that some societies with strong institutions and stable life conditions have passed a threshold, no longer leaning on prosocial religious elements to sustain large-scale prosociality. Some of the most cooperative and trusting societies, such as those in Scandinavia, are also the least religious (Zuckerman 2008). 

Women were more likely (vs. men) to dissolve relationships with men who engaged in frequent benefit-provisioning tactics (buying expensive gifts, taking to a nice restaurant, sexual favors, getting extra attractive for the ex-partner)

DeLecce, T. & Weisfeld, G.E. (2021). Testing the ability of the benefit-provisioning and cost-inflicting mate retention domains to predict initiator of relationship dissolution. Human Ethology, 36, 62-77. Jun 2021. https://doi.org/10.22330/he/36/062-077

Abstract: Research on mate retention often only aims to identify what constitutes mate retention tactics. In the current study, the effectiveness of mate retention tactics is explored by measuring relationship outcomes of tactics unlike previous research that measures effectiveness through perceptions of relationship satisfaction. Individuals who have experienced a nonmarital breakup reported on their own and their ex-partners’ mate retention tactics before the breakup to see which ones predicted the outcome of relationship dissolution. Tests for moderation by participant gender and male mate value were also included. Results revealed that, in accord with the mate retention tactic categorization put forth by Miner, et al., (2009), tactics that are performed by participants’ ex-partners that inflict costs increase the odds of dissolution. Moderation by gender was also observed such that women were more likely to dissolve relationships with men who engaged in frequent benefit-provisioning tactics. Discussion addresses both supporting and conflicting evidence for the effectiveness of the benefit-provisioning and cost-inflicting categorization of mate retention.

Keywords: relationship dissolution, mate retention tactics, mate value

Using Goodreads reviews for over 50,000 people, we can robustly & accurately infer Big 5 personality traits from reading choices

Predicting Personality from Book Preferences with User-Generated Content Labels. Ng Annalyn, Maarten W. Bos, Leonid Sigal, and Boyang Li. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06643

Abstract—Psychological studies have shown that personality traits are associated with book preferences. However, past findings are based on questionnaires focusing on conventional book genres and are unrepresentative of niche content. For a more comprehensive measure of book content, this study harnesses a massive archive of content labels, also known as ‘tags’, created by users of an online book catalogue, Goodreads.com. Combined with data on preferences and personality scores collected from Facebook users, the tag labels achieve high accuracy in personality prediction by psychological standards. We also group tags into broader genres, to check their validity against past findings. Our results are robust across both tag and genre levels of analyses, and consistent with existing literature. Moreover, user-generated tag labels reveal unexpected  insights, such as cultural differences, book reading behaviors, and other non-content factors affecting preferences. To our  knowledge, this is currently the largest study that explores the relationship between personality and book content preferences.

Index Terms—Personality Profiling, Narrative Preferences, Social Media, Behavioural Footprints

Gender Differences in the Intention to Get Vaccinated against COVID-19 - a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Zintel, Stephanie and Flock, Charlotte and Arbogast, Anna Lisa and Forster, Alice and von Wagner, Christian and Sieverding, Monika, Gender Differences in the Intention to Get Vaccinated against COVID-19 - a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (March 12, 2021). SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3803323

Abstract

Introduction: Since the end of 2020, the first officially approved vaccines against COVID-19 are available and vaccination roll out has started worldwide. As high vaccination rates are necessary to reach herd immunity and overcome the pandemic, it is important to identify sociodemographic characteristics that are associated with vaccination intention or hesitancy. The goal of our review was to analyze whether there are gender differences in the intention to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Method: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analytical calculations to analyze gender differences in the COVID-19 vaccination intention. PubMed, Web of Science and PsycInfo were repeatedly searched between November 19th 2020 and January 7th 2021 for studies reporting absolute frequencies in COVID-19 vaccination intention separated by gender or statistical tests for gender differences. A quality appraisal was conducted and averaged odds ratios comparing vaccine intenders among men and women were computed via meta-analyses.

Results: Sixty studies were included in the review and data for 46 studies were available for meta-analytic computations. A majority (58.3%) of papers reported men to have higher intentions to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Meta-analytic calculations of 46 studies (n = 141 550) showed that significantly more men stated that they would get vaccinated, OR of 1.41 (95% CI: 1.28 to 1.55 respectively). Findings suggest that this effect is evident in several countries around the world and that the difference is bigger in samples of health care workers than in unspecified general population samples.

Conclusion: This systematic review and meta-analysis provides evidence that men are more willing to have the COVID-19 vaccine. The reasons for the lower vaccination intentions of women should be investigated and addressed. Heterogeneity of data and representativeness of samples have to be considered when interpreting the results.

Keywords: COVID-19, vaccination, intention, gender differences, health care workers, systematic review, meta-analysis

Prominent economists have supposed that the private production of full-bodied gold or silver coins is inefficient: due to information asymmetry, private coins will be chronically low-quality or underweight; not so!

The private mint in economics: evidence from the American gold rushes. Lawrence H. White. The Economic History Review, June 23 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13086

Abstract: Prominent economists have supposed that the private production of full-bodied gold or silver coins is inefficient: due to information asymmetry, private coins will be chronically low-quality or underweight. An examination of private mints during gold rushes in the US in the years 1830–63, drawing on contemporary accounts and numismatic literature, finds otherwise. While some private gold mints produced underweight coins, from incompetence or fraudulent intent, such mints did not last long. Informed by newspapers about the findings of assays, money-users systematically abandoned substandard coins in favour of full-weight coins. Only competent and honest mints survived.

Check also These ancient weights helped create Europe’s first free market more than 3000 years ago. Andrew Curry. Science Magazine, Jun 28 2021. https://www.bipartisanalliance.com/2021/07/this-is-quite-blow-to-idea-that-elites.html

Dark triad personality traits of Machiavellianism & psychopathy are strongly associated with anti-natalist views; depression is found to be standing independently in a relationship with anti-natalist views

Philipp Schönegger (2021): What’s up with anti-natalists? An observational study on the relationship between dark triad personality traits and anti-natalist views, Philosophical Psychology, Jul 1 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2021.1946026

Abstract: In the past decade, research on the dark triad of personality (Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy) has demonstrated a strong relationship to a number of socially aversive moral judgments such as sacrificial utilitarian decisions in moral dilemmas. This study widens the scope of this research program and investigates the association between dark triad personality traits and anti-natalist views, i.e., views holding that procreation is morally wrong. The results of this study indicate that the dark triad personality traits of Machiavellianism and psychopathy are strongly associated with anti-natalist views. Further, depression is found to be both standing independently in a relationship with anti-natalist views as well as functioning as a mediator in the relationships between Machiavellianism/psychopathy and anti-natalist views. This pattern was replicated in a follow-up study. These findings add to the literature on dark triad personality traits and their relationship to moral judgments, suggesting that personality and mood play a substantive part in variation in anti-natalist  views in a lay population.

4. Discussion

This study aimed at empirically investigating a potential relationship of dark triad personality traits and views concerning the ethics of procreation, specifically anti-natalism. The data allow for the broad conclusion that there exists a strong relationship between endorsement of anti-natalist views and dark triad personality traits, especially for Machiavellianism (r = .490) and psychopathy (r = .621), less so for narcissism. Moreover, the follow-up study allowed for a replication of this general result, further strengthening the evidentiary basis for these findings. Further, the presence of a mediating role of depression in the relationships between Machiavellianism/psychopathy and anti-natalist views sheds further light on the findings while also making further plausible the claim that narcissism does not play a substantive role in this association. We take these findings to suggest a picture in which lay anti-natalist views stand in a significant relationship to dark triad personality traits and depressive mood.

Concerning the null hypotheses outlined earlier, for the main study, Null Hypothesis 1 and 2 could be rejected soundly (cf. Table 2; Table 3), as dark triad personality traits and depression were found to be standing in a remarkably strong positive relationship with agreement with anti-natalism while playing a mediating role in the main relationships. Null Hypothesis 3 could not be rejected (cf. Table 3), as both self-regarding and other-regarding risk-aversion did not stand in a relationship to either the anti-natalist aggregate measure or any individual items and also played no mediating role.

Overall, these findings present evidence that variation in lay agreement with anti-natalist views that procreation is morally wrong is, at least in part, explained by individual differences in personality and depressive mood. One main finding is that Machiavellianism and psychopathy stand in a strong relationship that is robust even in the follow-up, further strengthening the evidentiary basis for this claim. Narcissism’s relationship, however, both does not replicate in the follow-up and is not mediated by depressive scores, further indicating that narcissism falls outside the realm of explanatory capabilities of the picture proposed here and may be best explained by a different set of hypotheses and factors. This suggests that the picture is one of a ‘dark dyad’, i.e., of Machiavellianism and psychopathy, that explains a good deal of variation in anti-natalist views in a lay population respectively. This is consistent with a set of recent findings that suggest more generally that narcissism and the ‘dark dyad’ (i.e. Machiavellianism and psychopathy) are indeed two distinct constructs (Rogoza & Cieciuch, 2020).

The fact that narcissism only shows a weak or non-existent relationship suggests that the relevant personality features of Machiavellianism and psychopathy, for example, their tendency to low empathy and cynicism toward common-sense morality as well as reduced ability to feel pleasure (Treadway & Zald, 2011), are most closely associated with anti-natalist views and must thus play a part in the explanation as opposed to any factettes of narcissism. On this line of thinking, depression fits into this picture by drawing on depressive individuals’ devaluation of life and bleak outlook on the future. In other words, the results here suggest that those scoring high on Machiavellianism and psychopathy as well as depression (which mediates the main relationship), are more likely to feel negatively about life, common moral standards, and others more generally. That is, one is more likely to agree with the anti-natalist arguments that procreation is a moral wrong because of one’s own propensity to disvalue life, be it present or future.,24,25

As such, the role of depression is also crucial to understanding the present data. This is because the higher one scores on the depression scale, the more likely one might be to regard one’s own life as not worth living, possibly extending this sentiment and overgeneralizing to the claim that lives generally are not worth living and that bringing new lives into existence is a moral wrong because of this. Generally, however, there are two types of explanations about how the impact of depression might intersect with views about anti-natalism. First, one may refer to depressive realism, i.e., the claim that depressed individuals better perceive reality (Moore & Fresco, 2012) and are thus better equipped to judge the anti-natalist arguments. Conversely, one might also think that depressed individuals’ thinking inhabits certain flaws, making them liable to underestimate the goodness and value of life. This would be consistent with a rationalization explanation: One’s affect directly influences what one believes about the world, e.g., about the value of a life. The present data do not allow for a disambiguation between the depressive realist interpretation from the rationalization claim and further research is needed to shed light on this specific question.

The follow-up replication study aimed at testing whether the same pattern of results could be replicated and whether the pandemic overall influenced views on anti-natalism. Null Hypothesis 4 could not be rejected, as the follow-up found that there was no significantly higher or lower aggregate agreement with anti-natalist arguments and statements. Both on aggregate measures and on the majority of individual measures, participants reported insignificantly different agreement. Only on the topic of Misanthropic Anti-Natalism did participants show a change, however their agreement with this formulation of anti-natalism was reduced (contra the expected directionality of an increase). Specifically, they reported lower agreement with the claim that because humans cause such a substantial amount of harm to other humans, animals, and the environment, that it is wrong to procreate.

The data from the follow-up study also showed that the relationship between narcissism and anti-natalism weakened significantly, from a small to moderate effect in the main study, r = .293, p < .001, to virtually no relationship at all, r = −.001, p = .994. The relationships for Machiavellianism and psychopathy remained at moderate to strong levels. As such, this follow-up study shows that the results that Machiavellianism and psychopathy stand in a strong relationship to anti-natalism are robust. It also ought to diminish our certainty in the claim that narcissism is part of the picture in such a way that, given these data, one ought to be highly skeptical as to whether narcissism plays any role in any relationship to anti-natalism at all, which is in line with those arguing for the dark dyad and narcissism being distinct constructs (Rogoza & Cieciuch, 2020).

Overall, these findings strengthen the claim that at least some dark triad personality traits stand in remarkably strong relationships to anti-natalist views. Some potential reasons for this change in results from the main sstudy to the follow-up is non-random attrition, in that the follow-up sample was not a random draw from the initial sample. Irrespective of the actual reason, we take this follow-up to increase the evidentiary status of the findings that Machiavellianism and psychopathy strand in a strong relationship to anti-natalist views. Recall also that narcissism already showed the weakest association, and taken together with the follow-up, one might want to explicitly exclude it from any full picture going forward. Further, given that depression played an important mediating the main relationships, the fact that the follow-up did not find an effect for narcissism is further compatible with previous research that found that comorbidities of depression and dark triad traits are typically only found with regard to Machiavellianism and psychopathy, not narcissism (Gómez-Leal et al., 2019) and again suggests that the picture is one of the dark dyad being associated with anti-natalist views. As such, the data gathered in the follow-up make the overall picture more consistent with previous findings and may thus increase the plausibility of the findings.

The main interpretative challenge of the data gathered in this paper relevant to philosophical theorizing and broad understanding of the public discourse on the topic is this: Does the observed relationship between dark triad personality traits/depression and anti-natalism give us reason to reduce or increase our credence in anti-natalism? For one, one might think that higher psychopathy scores and the presence of (mild) depression might give one reason to doubt the judgments about anti-natalism made by the lay population. After all, is it rational to rely on the judgments of individuals whose personality profile differs substantially from the norm and who are more depressed than the mean person? Specifically, the Machiavellian (but also the psychopathic) personality trait is often associated with emotional detachment in those who also suffer from depression (Demenescu et al., 2010) as well as an inability to feel pleasure in some contexts (Gómez-Leal et al., 2019, p. 10; Cairncross et al., 2013). This would give one reason to believe that the lay evaluation of the quality-of-life argument central to Benatar’s formulation of anti-natalism (2006) might be subject to individual variation if these come with emotional detachment and the inability to feel pleasure. After all, emotional attachment and the ability to feel pleasure are central to our evaluation of life as good and as such tie directly into Benatar’s quality of life argument.26

Conversely, one might also think that depression and its hypothesized more realistic outlook on life and the disregard for common-sense morality present in dark triad personality traits might lead to the reverse conclusion, i.e., that because of the presence of this relationship, one ought to have higher credence in the truth of anti-natalism.27 However, the evidence that depression does indeed lead to a more realistic outlook on life is relatively restricted in methodological scope28 and generally shows relatively small effect sizes (Moore & Fresco, 2012, p. 505).29 Moreover, there is the additional challenge of evaluating a realist effect on purely evaluative topics such as anti-natalism. Given that no objective baseline can be established here (under plausible assumptions), we claim that one ought not be overly confident in the line of depressive realist argumentation with regard to anti-natalism and depressive mood.

For the purposes of this paper, we will not decisively argue one way or another. This is because the data presented here are the first in this line of research and can only explain a part of the picture. Further, arguing either way presupposes assuming a number of propositions that we are not prepared or able to make in a paper with this scope, eg., whether anti-natalist views are the type of views that depressed individuals or those high on dark triad personality traits are especially well or especially poorly equipped to judge. However, given the data obtained and the background literature referred to above, one might be more inclined to favor the former interpretative claim, i.e., that those high on dark triad personality traits and depression are less well-equipped to judge the truth of arguments about anti-natalism. In order to confidently answer those questions as well as further interpretative challenges, e.g., concerning the role of empathy in this relationship, however, more research has to be conducted. Specifically, further research should include a general expansion of the present data base on the psychosocial correlates of anti-natalist views, as well as a scientific analysis of expert populations such as professional philosophers. However, the data present here may be taken as indicative of moral reasoning in public discourse on anti-natalism as it does explain variations in lay views on anti-natalism.

Overall, we take the main philosophical value of these studies to be that they add to the literature on the relationship between personality traits and moral judgments as well as philosophical intuitions more broadly. It has been a goal of experimental philosophy generally to establish an empirically informed picture of folk morality, and the present data directly add to this project. In the same way that, for example, research on the role of culture, demographics, and reflection on lay philosophical judgments generally has contributed to the philosophical enterprise of identifying some of the sources and mechanisms which may drive certain judgments, this may also hold for questions relating to anti-natalism. We draw the tentative conclusions that the data present here, coupled with additional novel studies on additional populations, might go some way to provide a philosophically interesting picture of anti-natalist views that can then lead to an increase or reduction of our credence in anti-natalism. As outlined before, we believe that due to the high importance of figuring out whether anti-natalism is true or not, continuing this research (either by conducting further studies or by expanding the arguments relating to what we ought to draw from the data collected) is incredibly important under the possibility of humanity’s long potential future and the resultant significant moral risk.

4.1 Limitations

This study relied exclusively on an online sample of US residents drawn from MTurk. As such, cross-cultural conclusions should not be drawn lightly and any associations found here may be the artifact of cultural-linguistic circumstances. Moreover, the consistently strong intercorrelations between anti-natalism and dark dyad personality traits might also point toward the fact that both scales measure a similar underlying factor, such as a disaffirmation of life. However, this is both a potential problem and a possible upside. On the one hand, this might mean that the finding does not properly represent the relationship between two independent concepts, but rather measures closeness of related concepts. On the other hand, though, because anti-natalist views have not yet been associated with dark triad traits, even if this was true, the findings presented here would still represent novel empirical insight into the study of personality and folk moral judgment and may directly lead to further research projects.

The main limitation of the follow-up is nonrandom attrition. As this follow-up study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems plausible that the follow-up sample was not a sample randomly drawn from the previous population, but rather that the attrition rate might be connected to the experiences during the pandemic. For example, those hardest hit by the pandemic might not have had the time and energy to participate in an online study. As such, the results of the follow-up concerning the impact of the pandemic ought to be taken into account with a certain level of caution, though the purely replicatory function of the follow-up may be immune from this limitation to a certain degree. Further, because the follow-up was not planned at the time of the first study, no individual identifiers were collected that would have enabled proper within-subject analyses between the main study and the follow-up, further weakening the evidentiary status of the follow-up.

Results revealed an age-related difference in altruism, with older adults showing greater altruism than younger adults; demographic moderators (income, education, sex distribution) did not significantly moderate this effect

Sparrow, E. P., Swirsky, L. T., Kudus, F., & Spaniol, J. (2021). Aging and altruism: A meta-analysis. Psychology and Aging, 36(1), 49–56. Jun 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000447

Abstract: Life span theories postulate that altruistic tendencies increase in adult development, but the mechanisms and moderators of age-related differences in altruism are poorly understood. In particular, it is unclear to what extent age differences in altruism reflect age differences in altruistic motivation, in resources such as education and income, or in socially desirable responding. This meta-analysis combined 16 studies assessing altruism in younger and older adults (N = 1,581). As expected, results revealed an age-related difference in altruism (Mg = 0.61, p < .001), with older adults showing greater altruism than younger adults. Demographic moderators (income, education, sex distribution) did not significantly moderate this effect, nor did aspects of the study methodology that may drive socially desirable responding. However, the age effect was moderated by the average age of the older sample, such that studies with young-old samples showed a larger age effect than studies with old-old samples. These findings are consistent with the theoretical prediction of age-related increases in altruistic motivation, but they also suggest a role for resources (e.g., physical, cognitive, social) that may decline in advanced old age.

There is a significant positive association between religiosity & disgust sensitivity, which suggests that sensitivity to disgust could have distinct spiritual purity & moral self-regulatory response value for religious individuals

‘Look not at what is contrary to propriety’: A meta-analytic exploration of the association between religiosity and sensitivity to disgust. Zhaoliang Yu, Persefoni Bali, Myron Tsikandilakis, Eddie M. W. Tong. British Journal of Social Psychology, July 1 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12479

Abstract: Previous research has suggested that disgust sensitivity contributes to moral self-regulation. The relationship between religiosity and disgust sensitivity is frequently explored as a moderator of moral-regulating ideologies, such as conservative and traditional ideologies. However, religiosity is suggested to differ from these in moral attitudes against social dominance and racial prejudice. Psychological theories, such as the societal moral intuition and the evolved hazard-perception models, have proposed that there could be reasons to support a distinct relationship between religiosity and disgust sensitivity. These reasons relate to the intuitive pursuit of spiritual purity and the non-secular transcendental emotional-reward value of moral behaviour for religious individuals. In the present manuscript, we conducted the first dedicated meta-analytic review between religiosity and disgust sensitivity. We analysed a summary of forty-seven experimental outcomes, including 48,971 participants. Our analysis revealed a significant positive association (r = .25) between religiosity and disgust sensitivity. This outcome suggests that sensitivity to disgust could have distinct spiritual purity and moral self-regulatory response value for religious individuals.

Discussion

Summary of findings

The present study aimed to provide an evaluation of the relationship between religiosity and disgust sensitivity. The current meta-analytic summary showed that there is a positive correlation between religiosity and disgust sensitivity. The overall association between religiosity and sensitivity to disgust was positive (r = .253) and significant (p < .001) after controlling for heterogeneity, publication bias, parametricity, and adjusting for the effect of moderators, such as gender, sample type (student vs. general), and age (Borenstein et al., 2017; see Figure 2). The present analytic summary also revealed that gender strongly moderated positive associations between religiosity and trait-level sensitivity to disgust subtypes, including pathogen disgust (r = .127; p < .001) and sexual disgust (r = .262; p < .001; see, Schumm et al., 2013).

General discussion

Religiosity has been defined as an affiliation with a system of morals and often ritualistic practices that include the belief in the existence and a moral code associated with a transcendental entity, or entities (Fincher & Thornhill, 2012). Sensitivity to disgust has been approached as the belief or self-report that an event, cue, or elicitor will be experienced as aversive to a subject using questionnaire and self-report measures (Rozin & Haidt, 2013; Tybur et al., 2013). As mentioned in the introduction, theoretical models, such as the societal moral intuition and the EH-PS models, suggest that disgust sensitivity could relate to religiosity as part of a system of beliefs that contribute to moral cognition, emotions, and behaviours. This relationship is suggested to be distinct from the association of secular forms of morality and sensitivity to disgust in the sense that religiosity involves key conceptual differences to secular morality, such as the notions of supernatural invigilation and proportionality (Shariff, 2015).

In the current study, we showed that religiosity positively correlates with sensitivity to disgust. This finding cannot be interpreted to imply causality, such as whether sensitivity to disgust is a predictive marker for religious belief, or vice versa (Beit-Hallahmi, 2014). Instead, it offers the first meta-analytic dedicated findings that religiosity and sensitivity to disgust are, indeed, correlated (Terrizzi et al., 2013). As regards the proposed differences in the evolutionary trajectories between religious and secular factors, that could underlie the reported association, it is worth inquiring whether the relationship between sensitivity to disgust and religiosity can translate to high, or higher, compared to non-religious individuals, physiological reactions in response to disgust-related elicitors (Kapogiannis et al., 2009). The major consideration in this instance is that the result of such an empirical exploration will help to clarify whether the association between religiosity and sensitivity to disgust reflects a theoretical belief framework dissociated from behavioural (see, for example, Argyle, 2006; Beit-Hallahmi & Argyle, 1997; Nelkin, 2000) and physiological responsivity to stimulus exposure, or an actual physiological module for the avoidance of inferred/indirect threat (Henry, 2016).

This is a very critical distinction. The psychological models that have been associated with religiosity and sensitivity to disgust can be interpreted to suggest that physiological responses will occur when religious individuals are presented with emotional elicitors. The EH-PS model places sensitivity to disgust in relation to religiosity in continuity to an avoidance system related to indirect threat to fitness. Therefore, both disgust-related emotional elicitors and immoral emotional elicitors should stimulate physiological responses for religious individuals that reflect these avoidance mechanisms (Baumard & Boyer, 2013). Conversely, the societal intuitional model has been used to suggest that physiological responses to elicitors related to disgust sensitivity in religious individuals will not only be automatic and involuntary (Boyer & Liénard, 2006) but additionally possibly subject to pre-conscious or subliminal processing, given that their evolutionary origins are linked with intuitional processes (Shariff, 2015).

If these conditions are not met, and if, indeed, sensitivity to disgust does not translate to distinct physiological reactions in religious individuals, the arguments that have been proposed to address this association could be reduced to reflect belief systems without palpable physiological correlates (see Shariff, 2015). Along the same lines, the concepts of supernatural invigilation and proportionality suggest that to some extend religious individuals could be subject to deontic, prescriptive, and inviolate moral laws (Shariff, 2015). The expected outcome of this experiential belief to the morality of a transcendental entity – or entities – should be a sense of reduced moral self-authorship (see Dijksterhuis, Preston, Wegner, & Aarts, 2008) as well as a reduced sense of moral self-righteousness and authoritarianism (Haidt, 2012). If subsequent experimental efforts to provide evidence for these effects are not successful, the sceptical scholar could readily attribute the currently reported significant association to the strict and prescriptive laws that are often part of the participation in religious-related ritualistic practices (Barrett, 2000). The association could also be attributed to other moderating factors, such as secular sociosexual attitudes and beliefs (Weeden, Cohen, & Kenrick, 2008) and addressed as a means for ingroup socialization among morally compatible individuals (Shariff, Willard, Andersen, & Norenzayan, 2016).

As regards our additional findings, we showed that age was not a significant moderator for the association between religiosity and sensitivity to disgust (but see also Dienes, 2014). Several studies have proposed that sensitivity to disgust is higher in younger religious and non-religious adults due to inexperience and inhibitory mechanisms related to experiencing unwanted loss of control and uncertainty (Quigley, Sherman, & Sherman, 1997). Several studies have also suggested that disgust sensitivity can be higher in older/senior religious and non-religious adults possibly due to increased concerns for one’s physical and emotional well-being (Oaten, Stevenson, & Case, 2009). Our findings suggest instead that the association of religiosity and sensitivity to disgust is an enduring and not a transient or age-specific effect and that it can manifest throughout an individual’s lifespan (Zelenski & Larsen, 2000).

In the most surprising and possibly one of the most important additional findings of our analyses, we showed that gender and sample type had a weak effect-size significance trend influence on the correlation between religiosity and overall sensitivity to disgust. Gender was a significant moderator for the association between religiosity and subtypes of sensitivity to disgust. This finding suggests that gender plays an important role in the association between sensitivity to disgust and religiosity, particularly for sexual and pathogen/contamination-related cues. This could mean that, although religious individuals, independently of gender, have beliefs related to disgust sensitivity, sexual and pathogen/contamination sensitivity to disgust and religiosity are not reliably associated when we remove the effect of the responses of female participants. The meta-analysis matrix adds to this a novel finding. Gender moderated these associations as an interactive function of the effect of female participation in religiosity, although intriguingly female participation did not impact sensitivity to disgust subtypes (see Figure 4). Being female did not directly influence sensitivity to sexual and pathogen/contamination cues as previous studies proposed (Tybur et al., 2013), it increased the level of religiosity of an individual and moderated by association responses to disgust sensitivity subtypes and the interaction between religiosity and sensitivity to disgust. This is a most unexpected, promising, and novel finding that should be further explored by subsequent research.

Looking at the greater picture, in the present manuscript we explored one possible emotional and response attitude, and/or correlate – namely, sensitivity to disgust – that could influence religiosity. This can be the first step for further exploring whether shame, guilt, regret, self-reproach, and – most understatedly in previous psychological research (see, Fatima, Sharif, & Khalid, 2018) – positive-valence emotional states, such as awe, kindness, generosity, and calmness, could underlie and contribute to religious emotional experience and beliefs (Sharma & Singh, 2019). An important contribution of the current outcomes is that we provided evidence that this line of research can offer insightful results, theoretical advances, and further directions for experimental research. These can include the exploration of belief-system response attitudes and emotional correlates of religiosity and their possible distinctive functions within religiosity as possibly non-secular moral and experiential phenomena. The current manuscript could and should (Shariff, 2015) set an experimental and meta-analytic precedence towards the exploration of religiosity and belief-system response attitudes and emotional sensitivity as pathways to understanding religiosity further and in relation to human attitudes and experiences.

Limitations

In the current meta-analyses, the included studies employed questionnaire assessments for assessing the relationship between religiosity and sensitivity to disgust. Future experimental research could benefit from using psychophysiological assessments for exploring this relationship. This implementation will enable us to explore whether the current significant results reflect belief-system values, such as self-report responses, and/or psychophysiological emotional experiences for sensitivity to disgust (see, Tsikandilakis et al., 2021). The current meta-analyses included several different religiosity and disgust sensitivity questionnaire assessments. We must note that an important issue in meta-analytic research is whether the achieved meta-analytic power originates from sufficiently statistically powered studies (see, Amrhein, Trafimow, & Greenland, 2019). This is an important component of meta-analytic research that has, nevertheless, decreased impact in the current meta-analytic research due to the corrected-weighted statistical analyses (see Hedges & Schauer, 2019) of forty-seven experimental outcomes, including 48,971 participants (see also, Borenstein et al., 2017). It is very critical to mention as conclusive remarks that the vast majority of the included outcomes used samples, for which participants’ socioeconomic status and political beliefs were not measured. These variables could not be, therefore, included as moderators in the analyses. Exploring their influence should be a priority for experimental replications of the current findings. In addition, the pool of existing empirical studies did not also provide sufficient data to enable the examination across specific religious backgrounds or countries of origin. Further correspondence with the authors of the included studies did not result in sufficient information to perform a per religion analysis or the inclusion of religious affiliation as a categorical moderator in the meta-analysis. Further experimental research could benefit from exploring the effect that different religious affiliations confer on the association between religiosity and sensitivity to disgust.